Infandous by Elana K. Arnold Page A

something else. Except of course whatever you painted before isn’t erased; it’s just buried. It’s still there under the new layer of color and texture. It doesn’t go away. And whatever you’ve done before doesn’t go away either, no matter how purposefully you ignore it, how many new experiences you try to layer over it. Fairy tales are like this too. Disney makes them prettier and cleans them up, glossing over the gory parts and playing up the princess angle. But like with art, the original stories are underneath. They bleed through. With paintings that have been colored over, sometimes restorers strip away what’s on top to reveal the canvas’s first picture.
    I guess that’s like what people do in therapy. Right? They try to peel away the layers of action, of reaction, of feelings to get at the original source. The moment that precipitates everything that comes after.
    The girl on the screen sounds like she’s crying now, but that can’t be right because this isn’t that kind of porno. It’s just that it can all bleed together, one thing can look like something else.
    My workspace has a concrete floor webbed with scratch marks I’ve made cutting apart boxes with my X-Acto blade. Layers and layers of shapes cut into the floor until there is no way to untangle them, no way to say that this came before that but after this. No way to separate one image from the next. And layered together like that, intractably enmeshed, they form their own picture, different from anything I intended, but all me nonetheless.
    No one is sinking quarters—it’s like they’ve all agreed to let Darrin have his fill of me—and Darrin is showing no signs of satiety. He runs his fingers through my hair in a move I’d bet he got from some chick flick, and his kiss goes on and on. I let him. What’s the harm? He wants so little from me, just this, my lips, my breath. His mouth is too wet, too soft, more like puppy licks than anything else. One hand drops from my hair and paws at my side, coming as close as he dares to my breast.
    Finally, Sal sinks a shot and tells me to drink and, thinking about my studio floor, about lines cut into concrete, about layers of paint and art and painful mistakes, I forget to lift the cup with my left hand.
    “Caught you,” says Marissa. “Cough up a secret.”
    Maybe this is what I wanted all along.
    I finish my drink and set down the cup with an unsteady hand. Then I look deep into her eyes, their dark cobalt waiting with a mix of expectation and humor. The humor fades as she recognizes the weight in my expression.
    “Secret,” I say. “I am a horrible person.”
    A moment passes, and then her face cracks into a grin. “No secret,” she says. “I already knew that.”
    And of course she’s joking, but she’s wrong. I am horrible. I have become a beast, an abomination. A cautionary tale.
    It’s only in the absence of sound that I realize the porno isn’t on anymore. I look at the screen, expecting it to be blank, but it’s not; it’s paused. Someone must be sitting on the remote or something, but everyone’s too stoned to notice. The movie is stuck on a shot of the girl’s face, close up, and I think the expression is supposed to be ecstasy, but it could also be pain or some kind of horrible recognition. A word comes to me— anagnorisis —a term I managed to retain from the stupid vocab list in the Greek unit last year. I can see the flash card: “The awareness of the way things really are.”
    But then the moment has passed. Someone’s ass unpauses the movie and the others are back to their game and I push back out of my chair.
    “You leaving, Seph?” asks Marissa.
    Sal smiles at me and rubs his hand up Marissa’s thigh, and he says, “You don’t gotta leave, do you, Seph?” and I don’t think I’m imagining the intention in his eyes.
    This party is over, at least for me. “Crandall at eight,” I say. So I leave and they stay and I’ve spoken my truth, but no one